Absolutely appalling customer service ethic from Afrihost/Vumatel

Afrihost make a big play about being the best internet provider in the Country and how they still are absolutely clear on what excellence means to them - happy clients, but in my experience nothing could be further from the truth.

I have their 1Gb/s service which costs R1497 per month. The Router they provide, a Huawei Model W55200 V2 is only capable of a max 867 Mbps at 5 GHz according to the Huawei site so you are never going to get the speed that you are paying for.

If you develop a problem, as I have, of an intermittent connection they ask you a whole series of questions that clearly shows that they do not understand the concept of intermittent and expect you to be able to replicate the problem on demand. They then ask you to run tests (ping and traceroute) and give you instructions on how to run these tests on a windows machine. I do not have any Windows machines in my house running entirely on Apple Mac computers. When they finally understand that you need Mac instructions they provide these for you, but they are outdated and no longer exist on the Mac operating systems. They also tell you that you need to connect directly to the connection point via an ethernet cable. To do this with a MacBook requires a ****le costing over R1000 which they expect you to go and buy just to run the tests (running ping via a wireless connection and not the ethernet connection they require shows a frequent substandard result more than 50 times worse than you should expect from a 1GB connection).

Without these tests they refuse to help you or to lodge a ticket with Vumatel where the problem ultimately lies. Even if they do try to raise a ticket with Vumatel, Vumatel immediately close it without looking at the problem because you haven't provided the tests that you cannot run because you do not have the equipment to carry them out. Although Afrihost have both the equipment and expertise on their staff they will refuse to send someone to help you.

Moral of the story - do not use Afrihost or Vumatel if you can help it. They have no idea of what the meaning of good service or happy customers are.